It took me a while to figure out the best use of the new Action Button on my Apple Watch Ultra. Since you can trigger a Shortcut automation with the Action Button, this seemed like the obvious choice to get the most utility out of just one button.
Choose From Menu
The key to making this one button on the Apple Watch Ultra do all kinds of magic for you is to utilize the “Choose From Menu” option within Shortcuts. There is one very important reason you want to do this. No matter how careful you are with your Apple Watch, at some point, you are going to accidentally press that Action Button by putting your hand and wrist in an unusual orientation, and this is going to immediately kick off that Shortcuts automation.
I set off the Action Button every time I put on weightlifting gloves and perform certain movements with the gloves on. I’ve also run into this in other situations where I’m using my hand to help lower myself down onto something or am wearing winter gloves. But whatever the reason, having the “Choose From Menu” pop up first thing when the Action Button is pressed means, if you accidentally press the button, no action will take place until you then touch the screen of the Apple Watch and choose one of the menu items. You can accidentally press the Action Button over and over again and all the Shortcut will do is keep bringing up the same “Choose From Menu” and it won’t run any other automations until you make a selection from the menu or hit “Cancel” in the top left of the screen.
I set up my Shortcut for the things that I do on a daily basis. The first is starting a jump rope workout. The jump rope workout is the most similar workout that Apple has an option for to the 5-minute indoor fitness trampoline I use to warm up before every indoor workout I do. So, rather than have to press the Workout button on my Apple Watch and then scroll down to the jump rope workout and then press the screen again, I reduce this by one step. The other thing I do almost daily is either go out for a bike ride or a walk and when I get back I need to either open my front door or my garage. So the other two items in the “Choose From Menu” are “Open Front Door” and “Open Garage,” both of which I can open with a HomeKit command.
One More Option
But just to make the Action Button even that much more useful, I came up with a way for the Action Button to directly run an automation for me but in a way that wouldn’t lead to accidental automation triggers. I did this by wrapping an additional automation around a check for the current Focus Mode.
I have a Focus Mode I call “Wind Down” that I run at night when I am reading before bed. This Focus Mode specifically changes the Home Screen of my iPad mini so that just the reading apps that I use at night are visible. When I am just laying in bed and reading before going to sleep I’m not going to have an accidental Action Button press on my Apple Watch, so removing the extra protection of the “Choose From Menu” for this action makes a lot of sense for me.
What I chose to do with this is to run a HomeKit scene I have set up called “Bedtime” that puts all of the HomeKit-enabled lights in and around my house into the mode I want them in while we sleep—turning off most lights and dimming a few lights like stairwell lights down to very dim levels. So I press the Action Button my Apple Watch when I am ready to turn out the lights and go to sleep.
If you have an Apple Watch Ultra and want to try out the Shortcut I wrote for mine, you can simply download my Shortcut. I have made notes in the Shortcut in areas where you will need to edit and customize the Shortcut in order for it to work with your Home setup. Even if you don’t want to use any of the actions I have chosen, you can still start with the bare bones “Choose From Menu” structure I have set up and populate it with your actions from there.
